Original Artworks Gallery – Picky art

  How art in 2013 reflected economic inequalities and suggested alternative ways forward Diego Rivera, detail from Detroit Industry mural, commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1933. Courtesy: Bridgeman Art Library and The Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan   From where I sit, which is in New York, the mainstream conversation about art felt… Continue reading →

A painting by Pei-Shen Qian shown in a 2006 retrospective in China. BB Gallery, Shanghai   Recently, The Art Newspaper reported that Pei-Shen Qian had some of his paintings included in a group exhibition in a Shanghai gallery last spring. Scandal-following readers will recognize the name as that of a Chinese artist, once living in… Continue reading →

When the Guggenheim Museum sold pieces by Kandinsky, Chagall and Modigliani in the early 1990s to help it buy one of the world’s most important collections of Minimalist and Conceptual art, it knew it was paying not only for hundreds of seminal works but also for a mare’s nest of problems. An authorized installation of… Continue reading →

Picky Art Gallery tried out Google's new tool: http://picky-art-gallery.culturalspot.org/home           For the past few years, Google worked with museums around the world to make their collections available on the Google Cultural Institute. Now, they’ve opened up the technologies behind this project so that anyone with cultural content can publish it,… Continue reading →

  Hew Locke, For Those in Peril on the Sea, 2011, model boats and mixed media, 79 boats, installed in the lobby, Pérez Art Museum Miami. COLLECTION PÉREZ ART MUSEUM MIAMI, MUSEUM PURCHASE FROM THE HELENA RUBINSTEIN PHILANTHROPIC FUND AT THE MIAMI FOUNDATION, REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE ARTIST. PHOTO: DANIEL AZOULAY PHOTOGRAPHY. Allan… Continue reading →

Up close and personal … Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring, which can be seen at the Frick exhibition in New York. Photograph: Corbis   Vermeer, that genius of quiet intensity, has some very intense fans. According to the New York Times, superfans are flocking to America’s eastern seaboard, where an exhibition at the Frick,… Continue reading →

Mass infanticide – suprisingly desirable … The Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Reubens fetched £49.5m at auction. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA Last year a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream fetched $120m (£74m) at auction; in 24 hours last week, a Warhol made $105m (£65m) and a Bacon portrait of Freud reached $143m… Continue reading →

  Robert Atkins introduced the latest edition of his book ArtSpeak at the New York Public Library last nightby admitting that artspeak has gotten a bad rap. “Somehow the language used for describing and discussing art has a reputation for unusual opacity, even sadism,” he said. That’s the artspeak also known as International Art… Continue reading →

  Affectionate note … the sketch Salvador Dalí drew for Wallis Simpson, the duchess of Windsor. Photograph: Hansons Auction House/PA   It seems sadly inevitable. Salvador Dalí was nicknamed ávida dollars (“eager for dollars”) by his former friends the surrealists for abandoning idealism in favour of fame and money, and suspected of far worse.… Continue reading →